The Cuban actor Sergio Corrieri, who has died aged 68 of cancer, came of age shortly after Fidel Castro took power in 1959, enthusiastically ready to play a significant role in the revolution. Not only was he associated with two of the greatest films ever to come out of Latin America, I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba, 1964) and Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del Subdesarrollo, 1968), but he was a renowned theatre director, head of the culture department of the Cuban communist party, vice-president of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television and president of the Cuban Friendship Institute, a position he held until his death.

"I was born on the dark side of life. I was poor; it was the revolution that opened all of this to me," Corrieri once said. Born Sergio Corrieri Hernández, he explained how, as a child, he used to look at the city lights of Havana, which at the time seemed far away from his coastal hometown of Jaimanitas.

Corrieri went to Havana, where he joined the university theatre group mainly because he was, in his own words, "chasing a skirt". "I was hopelessly in love and I joined the group because I was only interested in getting closer to her, but I began to enjoy the classes and I decided to study theatre and become an actor." Until he became well known, his working-class father stopped talking to him.

Corrieri started his professional career at the Teatro Estudio, appearing in plays by Chekhov, Lope de Vega, Brecht, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee. At 22, he appeared in his first film, Cuba '58 (1962), a reconstruction of the start of the revolution that deposed Batista. Two years later, he had an important role in Mikhail Kalatozov's extraordinary I Am Cuba as a zealous freedom fighter leading a group of students determined to help Castro overthrow the system by any means possible. In one scene, he is stern when he rebukes a young student for not carrying out the assassination of a Batista crony, and a little later, when the student has been shot by the police, he touchingly covers his dead friend's face with the Cuban flag and helps carry his body past the wreckage of burning cars.

There followed two films by Fausto Canel, Desarraigo (Expulsion, 1965), shown at the San Sebastian film festival, and Papeles Son Papeles (Paper Is Paper, 1966). Neither the former, a love story across ideological barriers, nor the latter, a comedy about the Cuban black market, found favour in Cuba, which prompted the director to move to Franco's Spain. However, Corrieri went from strength to strength in Cuba. The aesthetic-looking Corrieri, who a critic recently described as "looking like the love child of Javier Bardem and John Malkovich", found himself portraying middle-class characters.

His most famous role, played with gentle gradations of feeling, was as a wealthy bourgeois intellectual in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment. The character, whose family flees to Miami shortly after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by the US, elects to stay and come to terms with the revolution. This most subtle and ironic investigation into the role of the intellectual in the new Cuba proved - if proof were needed - that third world cinema could hold its own in terms of sophistication with European films. It was the start of the década de oro (golden decade) of Cuban cinema.

In 1968, Corrieri founded the Escambray Theatre Group among a peasant community in La Macagua in the mountains. "We weren't trying to impose culture. We wanted to reach out to the people with points of view to help them understand their reality and be capable of transforming it."

The company, in which Corrieri was both director and actor, frequently toured Cuba, as well as other Latin American and European countries and the US. His theatre troupe also went to Angola to perform for Cuban troops fighting South African forces and arrived in Nicaragua days after the 1979 triumph of the Sandinista revolution.

"The revolution had changed our lives and opened new perspectives for Cuban culture. We understood that art had to be made with and for the revolution; art with sound values, performed while at the same time being a citizen and soldier," Corrieri once declared.

Corrieri won the best actor award at the 1973 Moscow film festival for his role in The Man from Maisinicu, directed by Manuel Pérez, set in 1964 in the Escambray Mountains. He plays an undercover agent, who infiltrates and destroys a band of counter-revolutionaries supported by the CIA. Both this and Black River (Rio Negro, 1977), about the rivalry between two political factions, adapted the style of the Hollywood Western and thriller genres and transported it to a rural Cuban setting. These films and the television series En Silencio Ha Tenido Que Ser (It Has Had To Be In Silence), in which he played a double agent, made Corrieri widely known among the general Cuban public.

In 1989, Corrieri gave up acting to concentrate on his state duties, becoming a stalwart and persuasive ambassador for his country. Last year, despite his fragile health, he agreed to head the organising committee for the seventh conference of the Association of Cuban Writers and Artists. When asked if he missed acting, Corrieri replied: "At times I feel nostalgic, but at those moments other efforts make me feel useful and fulfilled. If I had another life I wouldn't hesitate to live this same one again, trying to be even better."

· Sergio Corrieri, actor and director, born March 2 1939; died February 29 2008